Tuesday, 1 January 2013

It's the last day of the year and I have wanted to publish this video for over a month. If anyone questions whether there is apartheid on the West Bank, well, look at this video. "Apartheid on steroids," as the Nation put it.

The man in the video is Abu Ibrahim 'Attalah, 52, a father of seven who lives in the small Palestinian village of Beit Iskariya in the occupied West Bank southwest of Bethlehem.

Beit Iskariya is surrounded by Israeli settlements. Indeed, the most crushing part of the video occurs at about 3:50 when I ask him to name the settlements that surround him, and he moves around the compass, beginning on the north, naming nine or ten Jewish settlements by their Hebrew names. And he describes the efforts to choke his village so that the people leave: this is the ethnic cleansing that has been going on in Area C for many years now. more

NABLUS (Ma’an) -- Dozens of settlers raided the northern West Bank village Qusra overnight Monday, uprooting more than 190 olive trees, an official told Ma'an.

Several residents of the village, near Nablus, were assaulted, and homes and a tractor were also damaged in the raid, settlement monitoring official Ghassan Daghlas said.

Palestinian security guards chased the settlers, and detained four of them for a short period of time. The Israeli forces quickly intervened, entered the village, and released the settlers, Daghlas said.

Also overnight, settlers entered Beit Ummar village north of Hebron, and burned a car and tractor belonging to resident Suhail Bragheith. more